Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

FEB 2017

Books

It has always been the case, as long as I have—or anyone I know has—been reading the poems of Sarah Plimpton and looking at the (apparently) drastically simple forms of the drawings she constructs that are so instantly recognizable.

Books

For a long time, we humans have tried to distinguish ourselves from monsters. The Wonders of the East, an Old English precursor to the medieval bestiary, is a catalogue of creatures thought to inhabit Africa and Asia.

Books

Say you discover in your teens that your dad was married to another woman when he met your mother (and that he lied to your mother about his marital status), and that when your parents divorce, you go with your bipolar mother, and your older sister goes with your dad. Say your dad is a somewhat/sometimes charming guy but also secretive and always short on money, and that, at some point, you realize that the cause of this charming secretive cashlessness has to do with a severe gambling addiction.

Books

One of my muses is ambivalence. I think that conventions are both enormously appealing and enabling, but also potentially mind-deadening. Both are true. They can stimulate and they can constrain. I feel very passionate about the emotional and intellectual opportunities afforded by contrariness.

Books

And so, three generations of yearning wanderers are trapped in an emotional limbo between the United States and Russia, weighed down byyet also dangerously ignorantof history. When Lenny says, “nothing here is straightforward,” Krasikov wants us to think not only about Russia, but also family life, over the decades.

Books

I think he’s one of the least interesting things ever to happen to this country and electing him was the most obvious thing we could do. He’s the most American thing about America and we’re all just so disgusted and ashamed and horrified to realize it. But he’s the natural endpoint. And I don’t necessarily mean Trump, but someone like Trump.